augmented

bought some stuff...( macrame plant hangers at someone's behest...seems some house plants that have spent the summer outdoors are moving in for the winter...thinking insect denizens as well...we will see )...bought it from amazon

( death to "brick and mortar" retail )...it was delivered with alacrity yesterday...two days! customer service! "no personal interaction"...the heighth of covid-19 social responsibility...for whatever reason the purchase came in a box ( perhaps they were out of the correct size mailers...happens ) and the box was an object lesson in "augmented" reality and just one line of evidence as to why i do not have a smart phone and keep a faraday bag in my vehicle when i want my obsolescent flip phone to disappear from the electo-magnetic spectrum...

seriously the box promised me a trip into "augmented reality" ( as opposed to the "alternate" political/social reality we seem to be inhabiting at the moment...perhaps surreality would be more concise a definition ) because this was #more than a box...all i need do to enter this altered state was draw a face ( what face they obligingly left to my discretion ) on the pumpkin provided on the box...

and scan the magic square from "AmazonAR.app/Halloween" and seemingly the face would somehow, through the wizardry of the interweb, come to life...and, if my surmise is correct, inject a sophisticated tracking program into my phone...these vile cretins steal enough information without having to resort to this sort of duplicity...smart phones do many things...they do many things i can do without and amazon and google and facebook all already have voluminous dossiers on my on-line, purchasing, and, probably, personal habits garnered from extensive profiling without me being connected to the goddamned interweb 24/7 and have every move, economic, political, and physical tracked by some algorithm...so no "augmented reality' form me thanks...i have my hands full with the plain old one.